Educating the gut: socio‐emotional aspects of the learning organization

Abstract

Examines the idea of learning in organizations with a particular focus on how organization members learn from experience, and how managers might foster a facilitating environment for learning. Contends that the idea of the “learning organization”, as presented by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline, is problematic. Four dimensions of organization learning, absent or glossed over in Senge’s work, are framed as questions and addressed from a psychoanalytic frame of inquiry. Concludes that the acknowledgement of repressed feelings about the human struggle to learn, and the process of containment which might enable an internal organization of experience to be reviewed and reconstituted, is necessary for organizational learning. This is understood as an “educated gut”.